THE ETHICS OF SEX 185 



be artists in fashioning our characters, not 

 hodmen. The general experience is unani- 

 mous that discipline in control of thoughts, 

 words, and deeds helps a man to keep a rein 

 on his sex-impulses. The ethical value of 

 athletics and of exercises like climbing and 

 long tramps is great. Without being a prig, 

 the adolescent can keep always before him 

 the ideal of vigorous health, which has a very 

 close connection with morals. But it is not 

 adolescents only who require discipline in 

 control. Fere refers with a touch of scorn to 

 those husbands who do not hesitate to inflict 

 a new pregnancy upon their wives a few weeks 

 after their delivery, and refuses to accept the 

 apology that otherwise they must do worse. 

 Those are not awanting, he says, who are able 

 to respect the period of pregnancy and lacta- 

 tion, who are neither the worse of it nor un- 

 faithful. Yet there is a risk that the increasing 

 personal and political freedom of women may 

 lead them to attempt to " force the pace " of 

 moral evolution, demanding more sexual tem- 

 perance than the average man can at present 

 stand; but against that has to be set the 

 desirability of coming to an end with a condi- 

 tion of affairs in which wives are riot allowed 

 the sovereignty of their own bodies. That this 

 is wrapped up with housing reform and the 

 like, is obvious. 



HEALTHFULNESS. Those who get a fair 

 start and have not too hard a life know that 

 a failure in vigorous health usually means that 

 there has been slackness or indulgence or care- 

 lessness in some form or other, excepting the 

 casualties of microbic infection, though even 



